predated the late New Kingdom and may have been a reaction to the Amarna revolution., which had tried to eliminate the power of the Amun priesthood. After the failure of Akhenaten’s reforms that priesthood may have had a major resurgence, and we see a new way in which they interfered in official life: the oracle. The gods of Egypt had communicated in oracles earlier in the New Kingdom. Amun had proclaimed Hatshepsut king this way, for example (see Chapter 7). Oracles were rare, however, until the

palace revolt in Persia to claim kingship of Egypt in 404. Until 400, people from Elephantine in the south continued to recognize the Persian Artaxerxes II, however. Amyrtaios was the sole ruler of Manetho’s 28th dynasty. A family from the Delta city Mendes replaced him as the 29th dynasty. When its founder, Nepherites I, died in 393 three men claimed the throne. The winner, Hakor, did have a stable reign for 13 years and even supported anti-Persian activity in Cyprus. His successor, however, was

Foxwell (1940) From the Stone Age to Christianity -Monotheism and the Historical Process, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Albright, William Foxwell (1960) The Archaeology of Palestine, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books. Aldred, Cyril (1988) Akhenaten. King of Egypt, New York and London: Thames & Hudson. Allen, James P. (2002) The Heqanakht Papyri, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. Allen, James P. (2005) The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, Atlanta: Society of Biblical

working three-month stints. If the general population of Egypt at the time was 1.5 million, as some scholars reckon, this would have represented some 5 percent of the adult male population. They had to abandon their usual tasks at home, which may have been possible in periods when agricultural duties were limited. If work on the pyramids was only seasonal rather than year-round, however, the number of people involved and amount of labor to be done in a day would have been larger. Later Greeks

northern Syrian city of Ebla, but there is not much. Conversely few names of Levantine cities appear in Egyptian texts. It was only in Sinai – an intermediate zone between Egypt and Asia with non-sedentary populations – that Egyptian presence was constant from the 3rd through 6th dynasties, as inscriptions of royal names found there document. The aim was to mine turquoise and copper, and there was no reason to annex the region. Figure 3.6 Bears captured as booty by King Sahura on his Libyan